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Michael Löwy Bio-Bibliographical Sketch

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Michael Löwy Bio-Bibliographical Sketch Lubitz' TrotskyanaNet Michael Löwy Bio-Bibliographical Sketch Contents: Basic biographical data Biographical sketch Selective bibliography Basic biographical data Name: Michael Löwy Other names (by-names, pseud. etc.): Michael Lowy * Michel Löwy * Carlos Rossi Date and place of birth: May 6, 1938, São Paulo (Brazil) Nationality: Brazil ; French Occupations, careers, etc.: Professor (em.) of Sociology, scholar, writer, editor Time of activity in Trotskyist movement: 1968 - Biographical sketch -preliminary draft only- Prof. (em.) Dr. Michael Löwy1 is a distinguished and eminent French-Brazilian social scientist, Marx- ist philosopher and literary scholar. He was born in São Paulo (Brazil) on May 6, 1938 as a son of Kurt Löwy, a chemical engineer, and his wife Hedwig (b. Löwinger), a teacher. Both parents were German-speaking Jews from Vienna (Aus- tria) who had come to Brazil as immigrants in 1934. Michael Löwy has an elder brother, Peter, born in 1933. He was married first with Ilana Zelmanowicz from whom he got a daughter (b. 1975) and a son (b. 1977). In 1980, the couple parted in mutual agreement, and Michael Löwy married Eleni Varikas [Elenē Barika] (b. 1949), a historian from Greek origin who lectures at Université de Paris VIII. Löwy grew up in Brazil. After having finished his school education, he attended the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas at the Universidade de São Paulo, where Fernando Enrique Cardoso was one of his teachers and where in 1960 he earned a MA degree in social sciences. In 1961, Löwy, who already was fluent in several languages, was awarded a scholarship for France and went to Paris where he later permanently settled, becoming a French citizen. He studied sociology under the renowned Professor Lucien Goldmann (1913-1970) who enjoyed an international reputation as an outstanding Marxist philosopher. Goldmann's impact on Löwy was quite considerable 2. Gold- mann also supervised Löwy's thesis Révolution communiste et autoémancipation du prolétariat dans l'œuvre du jeune Marx by which in 1964 he earned the First Doctorate degree ("3ème cycle") from 1) His name is sometimes incorrectly spelled "Michel Lowy", "Michael Lowy" or "Michel Löwy". In Trotskyist publications, Löwy sometimes used the pen name "Carlos Rossi". He should not be confused with another “Michael Loewy”, associate professor of Eco - nomics at the University of South Florida (Tampe, Fla.) 2) "At the same time [in 1960/61] I discovered the writings of the French/Jewish/Romanian Marxist sociologist Lucien Goldmann which opened a new and broader intellectual horizon before my eyes. Fascinated by his brand of humanist Marxism (inspired by Georg Lukács), I decided to apply for a scholarship to study in Paris and to work on a PhD. with Goldmann." (Löwy, Michael: Transforming the world : an interview with Michael Löwy [by Terry Murphy], in: Against the Current, n.s. 9.1994 (4=52), p. 26. © by Wolfgang & Petra Lubitz 2004 — page 1 Lubitz' TrotskyanaNet Michael Löwy Bio-Bibliographical Sketch École Pratique des Hautes Études. Several years later, this work was published with title La théorie de la révolution chez le jeune Marx (Paris, Maspero, 1970) and was translated into several languages. Subsequently, Löwy spent some years in Israel earning his living by university jobs in Haifa and Jeru- salem and learnt Hebrew, before he became a lecturer at the university of Tel-Aviv. He left Tel-Aviv in 1968 and during the winter term 1968/69 functioned as assistant to Professor Peter Worsley (1924- 2013) and as lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester (Britain). Löwy returned to Paris in 1969 to become assistant to Professor Nikos Poulantzas (1936-1979) at the Université de Paris VIII (Vincennes). At the same time, Löwy began to work on his habilitation thesis about György Lukács (1885-1971)and in 1976 eventually earned a PhD degree ("doctorat d'État") from the Université de Paris V; his thesis, supervised by Professor Louis-Vincent Thomas (1922- 1994), was titled L'évolution politique de Lukács 1909-1929 : contribution à une sociologie de l'intelligentsia révolutionnaire; in 1976 it was published by Presses Universitaires de France with title Pour une sociologie des intellectuels révolutionnaires : l'évolution politique de Lukács, 1909-1929. Löwy became Professor of Sociology and from 1978 until his retirement functioned as Research Director in Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. Furthermore, since 1981 he was a regular guest lecturer at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, and he has been a member of the Centre d’ Études Interdisciplinaires des Faits Reli- gieux, Paris. He has been holding seminars and guest lectures at a considerable number of universities in France, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Cuba and elsewhere, and frequently participated in in- numerable scholarly symposia and presented his research results in scientific conferences held in France, the United States, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Brazil, Israel and so on. In 1984, he was awarded the Silver Medal of the CNRS as best social scientist. During the last 20 years, a special focus of his research interest was on the sociology of religion. His magnum opus in this field was his book Redemption and utopia (originally published in French and translated into several languages) in which he investigated into the genesis of religious and non-reli- gious eschatologies and of utopias and their differences in view of their liberation perspectives. Other main fields of Löwy's scholarly research work have been the sociology of knowledge, the theology of liberation, messianism and utopian thought, romanticism, Jewish-German culture, Marx and Marxism, Marxism and the national question, nationalism and internationalism, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution and the Third World, Latin American Trotskyism, utopian and idealist dimensions in Marx- ist and libertarian thought. He has been publishing a very considerable number of books (some to- gether with Robert Sayre, sociologist at Université de Paris VI), about the just mentioned subjects. Many of his books and articles have been translated into various (altogether more than 25) languages and thus have found international reception and audience. The number of his contributions to journals, collections, conference proceedings, encyclopaedias and other collective works is impressive and by far exceeds the number of his books. It is so to speak almost impossible to find out a bibliography about great thinkers, writers, social philosophers and critical Marxists of the 20th century without com- ing across Löwy's name, since he has been intensively dealing with and writing about such outstanding men and women of achievement as for example Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, György Lukács, Lucien Goldmann, Christa Wolf, José Carlos Mariátegui, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Gershom Scho - lem, Ernst Bloch, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, Ernesto Che Guevara, Leon Trotsky, Ernest Mandel, and last not least Walter Benjamin. Löwy also functioned as supervisor/director of a number of dissertations, amongst them the thesis of Enzo Traverso who later published several renowned works about Marxism and the Jewish question and about the Holocaust. Regarding himself a socialist since 1954, Löwy in the early Sixties became a member of the Parti Socialiste Unifié (PSU) before in 1968 associating with the Fourth International (USFI) and becoming a member of its French section, the Ligue Communiste (LC, later renamed Ligue Communiste Révolu- tionnaire, LCR), actively participating in its discourse and contributing a considerable number of articles to its journals and bulletins as well as to many serial publications of the Fourth International and its various national sections. After the dissolution of the LCR, Löwy in 2009 became a member of © by Wolfgang & Petra Lubitz 2004 — page 2 Lubitz' TrotskyanaNet Michael Löwy Bio-Bibliographical Sketch the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA). Furthermore, Löwy has always been engaged in various solidarity and liberation movements in France and on an international scale; thus he has been giving his support and endorsement to the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) and to various anti- globalist and anti-neoliberalist activities and networks such as ATTAC (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières pour l'Aide aux Citoyens) and the World Social Forum. He can also be regarded as a convinced spokesman of the eco-socialist tendency within the spectrum of the far left; he was co-author of the International Eco-Socialist Manifesto and co-organizer of the First International Ecosocialist Meeting (Paris, 2007). For more biographical information about Löwy see for example the items listed in the last paragraph of our bio-bibliographical sketch, for instance the excellent sketch by Frédéric Thomas and the collec- tion "Cartographie de l'utopie" (Paris, 2011). You may also visit Michael Löwy's blog in the WWW ("Le blog de Michael Lowy") as well as the Wikipedia articles (in various languages) dealing with Löwy. “There is no automatic socialist future, no guaranteed progress and no ‘final crisis of capital- ism’ leading by itself to the proletarian utopia: the choice between socialism and barbarism is still open, and its outcome depends on each one of us” 3 Selective preliminary bibliography Some introductory remarks It goes without question that Michael Löwy is among the most productive contemporary Marxist/Trotskyist scholars and writers. We should like to emphasize that we do not at all claim 'completeness' with regard to our following Selective Bibliography. Although listing a veritable amount of literature, it must be said that un- doubtedly a considerable number of sources have not been considered here, for example many of the translations of Löwy's works, particularly translations into non-Western European languages. Other items may simply have escaped our attention, at least until now. Non-print media including all kinds of electronic resources have been omitted, too. Nevertheless it seems that there is no Löwy bibliography which could claim for more compre- hensiveness and density than ours.
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